30/03/2025
Variation is Healthy
Dear xoxoxox
You are an amazing woman.
Your leadership skills are excellent.
Thank you for so generously and graciously inviting us to play with you.
Your love is lovely.
I can see that what you do works well.
For those who regularly fill their environment with recorded sounds.
For those who live where there is always noise.
For those who usually have a device playing.
For those who think synthetic is as good as real.
I don't.
I give myself the gift of natural sounds.
I only listen to live music.
Music made by nature.
Or by real humans with real instruments and real drums, make of real materials.
I listen to the Silence.
The silence of the forest.
The silence of the mountain.
The silence inside.
There is no way I — or, I maintain, anyone — can hear my (their) body when assaulted by "music" created by synthesizers and drum machines.
Machines are regular.
Deadly regular.
Health comes from variability.
A real drummer varies slightly from beat to beat.
A machine does not.
I am human.
I vary slightly from beat to beat.
The longer I danced to the music you played, the worse I felt.
The more I allowed myself to be present with my body, the more places I found that were cowering and trembling, tightening and cramping in response to the onslaught of sounds entering my ears.
Blocking my ears returned me to serenity.
Turning off the sound restored me to ease.
I'm taking the time to write to you.
But, since both you and your helper dismissed my distress yesterday with platitudes about caring for "everyone," I doubt I will have much effect on you.
I would like it very much if I could encourage you to think more about the sounds you expose us to while dancing.
They are important.
You asked us to be in touch with our bodies
But you chose music created for ignoring the body.
Disco music is for times of abandon.
When life is too much,
A way to shake out the pain of existence.
Shut down your thinking,
Embrace oblivion.
Too loud to talk.
Too loud to think.
Too loud for awareness.
I feel blessed to have had this experience with you.
It focused me on the deep difference between machine sounds and natural sounds.
It makes me keenly aware of the almost continuous sound beating that most people endure,
But don't recognize.
Perhaps it is why they feel so disconnected from life and joy.
I am often asked how I knew I had cancer.
Twice.
When the doctors dismissed me.
Couldn't see it on their scans.
Perhaps this is part of the answer.
I'm not diverting and denigrating my natural rhythms with recorded sound,
Reproduced sound.
I'm listening to myself, observing my body, in the silence.
I'm listening because I want to hear.
Observing because I want to see.
Recorded music closes my ears.
Shuts down my healthy responses.
I have no choice but to abandon my own rhythm and follow its rhythm.
My heart syncs to the beat.
If a drum machine, my heart tries to replicate that, becomes mechanical.
My nervous system pulses along with the beat.
And gets stuck in the repetition.
Repeating.
Repeating.
Even mitochondria may be deranged by mechanical music, loud music, disco music.
Losing their natural healthy rhythm.
I'm listening.
What are they telling me?
Yesterday I explored white noise
For my upcoming class about shamanic healing with waterfalls
The definition of white noise begins: "the hum of a refrigerator, the sound of a fan."
I listened to machine-generated white noise.
I listened to recorded waterfall sounds, wave sounds, rain sounds.
I could tell the difference.
I could hear and feel the natural variations in the recorded sounds of nature.
There was no variation in the machine sound.
"Perfect is inhuman."
Health is variation.
Health is responsiveness.
Health is complex.
Real sounds vary.
Live sounds are complex.
Dance to your own drummer.
In beauty.
Breathing with the plants in a giveaway dance.
Let your heart beat with the earth's heart.
Become one with that complex, varying beat.
Listen to the silent music of the green blessings all around you.
Not the sound of one hand clapping
The sound of everything applauding
Gratefully
Joyously
